Yesterday (Friday 1/16/09) was beautiful; sunny, a slight breeze and temperatures in the mid 60°’s. I spend the day wandering around the Old City and going to the market to stock up on groceries. In the evening there were fireworks – sort of.
First, the weather. My Macintosh computer has a handy little program called the dashboard. Dashboard allows you to have instant information, in the form of widgets that pop-up on the screen with the touch of a button. I have widgets that convert Centigrade to Fahrenheit; that give me the time in Anchorage, Detroit and Kolkata; and one that gives me the weather forecast for Jerusalem. For the first week here I was puzzled because the weather widget was unreliable – it would say rain and we would have sun, it would say a low in the 20°’s and it went below 40°. After some dissection I discovered that I had the widget set for Jerusalem, Pennsylvania rather than Jerusalem, Israel. Now the widget is much more reliable (actually to use the correct research term, it is more valid, it was always reliable).
I arrived in the Old City about 8 a.m. It was very quiet, this was partly due to the hour and partly due to the Muslim Sabbath. I wandered for many hours around the old city, looking at the Cardo,
watching people at the Western Wall, examining the reconstruction of the Hurva Synagogue, finding my way up to the rooftops, and walking the Via Dolorosa. One of the highlights was climbing up to the tower of the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer for 360° views of the Old City and beyond.
There was a large police presence in the Old City, particularly in the Muslim Quarter. There were many groups of ten, fifteen and twenty-five police officers, most with full riot-gear. It was a bit unnerving, but at the same time it was also very quiet. As the morning wore on and the number of people in the Old City increased it still had a calm feeling. I later learned, from reading the Jerusalem Post, that the Government had prohibited Muslim men under age 40 from praying at the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Many hours later, sitting in my living room, with my aching legs propped up, I heard fireworks. Looking out my fourth-floor balcony to the South I saw flashes of light in the valley below, but no fireworks in the sky. In the valley below is the village of al-Issawiya. Then I heard a crowd shouting something. This disturbance carried on for a couple of hours. The “fireworks” were firebombs and likely tear gas. A news brief in the Sunday Jerusalem Post described the incident as a “150 torch-carrying residents” protesting the war in Gaza. A brief search of the Jerusalem Post and Haaretz revealed that this neighborhood has been a scene of conflict over the years.
Without a doubt it was scary. Rationally I was not in any real danger. When I spoke about this with other Jerusalem residents, Israelis and ex-patriots, no one else had heard about this. In their own ways they said to me, “This is Jerusalem, so what, get use to it.”
While the evening alarming, the day was how I envisioned spending time in Jerusalem. Here are some pictures from my day.
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